The result is often delicious, but the timing is tricky unless you get it exactly right, the legs will be perfect but the breast, once again, will suffer. Dry brining-a curiously contradictory concept, made popular by the late Judy Rodgers, of San Francisco’s Zuni Café-involves salting the chicken first, then drying it out (as Helen Rosner has noted, a hair dryer is a perfectly acceptable kitchen tool), so that when it goes into the oven (a very hot one), its fat renders immediately.
The practice of brining (soaking the bird overnight in a salty liquid before cooking) is based on an assumption that a wet bloated breast won’t dry out, and it usually doesn’t-but, being wet and bloated, it isn’t exactly a flavor bomb. Of the many strategies devised to surmount the challenges of whole-roasting a chicken, some now seem like fads. In French, it’s called “ un sot-l’y-laisse”-i.e., only an idiot leaves it behind. But the whole, intact chicken, especially when roasted, has properties that you don’t want to lose by breaking it into bits: for instance, the three surprisingly satisfying segments of the wing, which you can eat with your fingers (you’d never bother with, say, the delicate little flappers of a tiny quail), or the wedge of yumminess surrounding the wishbone, or, possibly best of all, the “oyster,” that teaspoon of tender meat residing near each thigh. This approach is a no-brainer with other birds, especially duck, whose breast is exquisite when rare and whose legs are scrumptious beyond belief when simmered for several hours in barely bubbling fat, for duck confit (from the French verb confire, meaning to conserve: traditionally, the legs are stored in the fat they’re cooked in). The simplest fix is to respect the science of the fowl’s anatomy-remove the breasts, snap off the thighs, and cook them separately. The former tastes of nothing if cooked too long the latter is impossible to chew if cooked too fast. White meat (the breast) likes to cook quickly dark meat (the legs) needs long and slow. The difficulty, of course, is that the chicken, like many birds, consists not of one type of meat but of two-one white, the other dark. In fact, it is almost impossible to get consistently right. Roasted chicken is a Sunday lunch you can count on or a bistro dinner, with hot fries and mayonnaise or a don’t-think-twice homey meal, with potatoes and gravy, for friends who just showed up in town and want to come over this evening. It is often said that the best test of both the professional and the home cook is a roasted chicken, that, if nothing else, a good cook should always be able to serve up a beautiful bird-crispy, appetizingly fragrant, the skin deeply golden, with meat so moist that you’re tempted to tear it off the bone with your fingers.
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